Bricklaying cost per m², built up properly

What a bricklaying rate covers, and what it does not

The rate above is labour only - the gang’s time to lay the brickwork, and nothing else. On facing brickwork that is usually the smaller half of the price: at sixty bricks to the square metre, materials at 60p to 90p a brick put £36 to £54 of brick alone against roughly £36 of labour, before mortar, wall ties, insulation or cavity trays.

Scaffold sits outside it too, and deliberately. Scaffold is priced by lift and elevation, not by wall area, so folding it into a per-square-metre figure produces something that looks precise and is wrong on every job that is not the shape you assumed. Price it as a lump sum in the job section, the way you would on a real quote.

Why the labourer is in the gang, and what happens if you leave them out

A bricklaying gang is two bricklayers to one labourer because one labourer keeps two trowels going in mortar, brick and ties, and no more. Price the bricklayers alone and the rate lands around £15.74 a square metre instead of £22.05 - you have just given away nearly a third of the labour, and it is a third that shows up as an unpaid person on site every day of the job.

It is the commonest structural error in a self-priced brickwork quote, and it is invisible until the job is running, because the arithmetic is perfectly correct - it simply prices the wrong number of people.

What actually changes the price on a real job

Output, how many bricks a day get laid, moves the rate one for one, and almost everything else on a job moves output. These are the ones worth reaching for the slider over:

• Bond. Straightforward stretcher bond runs around 500 bricks a day. Flemish bond, English bond or anything decorative drops that to nearer 300 - a forty per cent swing in the labour, and the single biggest thing missed when a quote is put together from a remembered rate.
• Openings and detail. A wall with windows, reveals, cills and arches is cutting and setting out rather than laying. The square metres go down and the hours do not.
• Height and scaffold lifts. Every lift costs most of a day of stop-start while the scaffold moves, and it is a fixed cost against a smaller area on a small job.
• Weather. Brickwork stops below about 3°C and stops in driving rain. A winter programme is not a slower programme so much as an interrupted one.
• Repetition. Long straight runs are the fastest brickwork there is. A gang that is on the same detail all week gets quicker; a gang moving between piers, returns and features never does.

If your job is Flemish bond with a lot of openings, drag the output down to eight or nine square metres a day and watch the rate. That is what the job is actually worth, and the reason we put the control on the page rather than choosing for you.

Pricing brickwork for a tender rather than a quote

Two things change when the price is going into a tender rather than to a private client. Preliminaries stop being your problem and start being priced separately - welfare, scaffold, plant, supervision usually sit in the main contractor’s preliminaries rather than in your unit rate, so a rate that quietly carries them is a rate that loses.

And the rate is compared line by line against other people’s. That is where a build-up earns its keep: when a quantity surveyor asks how you got to your figure, “a gang of two and a labourer at published rates, 500 bricks a day” is an answer. A number you remembered from the last job is not.

Working out a whole brickwork job

Open the job section on the calculator and put the wall area in: the rate spreads across it, your scaffold and skip go on as lump sums, and the minimum charge holds the floor if the job is smaller than a day. Sixty square metres of facing brickwork with a £2,000 scaffold and a £300 skip comes out around £4,441 of labour and lump sums - with the bricks, mortar and ties still to add.

If you price work like this every week, that is the job HubTrack does: your gang and your rates remembered, applied across a whole job, with the paperwork the tender asks for kept alongside it rather than in a different folder.